Thursday, September 27, 2007

The Funny Pages

The NY Times shows its not entirely worthless by running a new series by Dan Clowes. They are also paying attention to other alternative comics artists like Seth, Chris Ware and Joe Sacco. This slideshow on comics is excellent.

Sunday, September 23, 2007

At Work?

Here’s a picture of me in my office trying to solve that Grow game last week.

Sunday, September 16, 2007

The Best of Google Street View

Hilarity ensues

Wednesday, September 12, 2007

Yikes!

Lots of reasons to say Holy Sh--!

Monday, September 10, 2007

Batman by Dostoyevsky

A clever transposing of two classics.

Saturday, August 25, 2007

Wrapped in Plastic

Just when I thought the comic book business couldn’t get any crazier, someone surprises me.

REMEMBER when comic books were considered too juvenile to be read? Now it appears that they have become too valuable to be touched.

A company in Sarasota, Fla., has created a sensation among collectors by taking their comic books, both rare vintage issues and brand-new ones, and encasing them in plastic slabs that make them both unreadable and instantly more valuable.

The Captain Marvel and Donald Duck comic books that arrive at the offices of the Certified Guaranty Co. are treated like archival treasures of the highest order—armed sentries guard the lobby, technicians and appraisers wear latex gloves as they carefully examine each page and a sophisticated sonic device is used to seal the books up in the sturdy plastic containers that some collectors call “coffins.”

Depending on the age and pedigree of the book being appraised and “slabbed,” CGC charges from $12 to $1,000 for its services and, in upcoming months, the 7-year-old company will slab its 1 millionth comic book. That book may be a 60-year-old issue of Detective Comics that costs as much as a Porsche but it could also be the latest $3 issue of World War Hulk—about half of the books that come to CGC now are fresh from the printer and probably 80% of them have never been read.

“It’s changed the nature of the hobby, it’s turned comic books into a medium of exchange instead of a medium of entertainment,” groaned James Friel, who works at Comic Relief, the longtime landmark store in Berkeley. To Friel, who has been collecting comics since 1958, “it makes these books a sealed-up commodity. You can’t read them. It makes me sad. Some of these books will be sealed up forever.”

Read the whole things. It’s nuts. 

Wednesday, July 04, 2007

He Lives!

Steve Aragon, 30, gets ready to take a picture of his sons Giovanni, 7, and Esteban, 4, outside the 7-Eleven in Burbank, Calif. Monday, July 2, 2007. Over the weekend, 7-Eleven Inc. turned a dozen stores into Kwik-E-Marts, the fictional convenience stores of the television show ‘The Simpsons.’ (AP Photo/Damian Dovarganes)

Tuesday, May 01, 2007

I’m a Marvel and I’m a DC

Monday, April 09, 2007

RIP Johnny Hart

The creator of the newspaper strip BC and the Wizard of ID is gone. I was a huge fan of that strip as a kid. I had lots of the paperback collections, along wioth Peanuts. 

Wednesday, April 04, 2007

Crime Comics Blog

Writer Chris Mills has created a blog for crime comics called Guns in the Gutters. There will be lots of reviews there, including reviews of some of my books. In fact, they used the cover of Streets #1 in the logo.